


Thalassophagophobia

by orphan_account



Category: The Tempest - Shakespeare
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:51:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>n. The fear of being eaten by the sea. A retelling with an irretrievable wreck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thalassophagophobia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Allothi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allothi/gifts).



_The cannibal…haunt[s] the traveler in the New World…There were also dragons…There is a common thread to these New World prodigies. They seem to represent an unconscious fear of being devoured, swallowed up, a fear of disappearing into the mysterious otherness of the New World._

\- Charles Nicholl, _Conversations with a Giant_

~

 

He takes her out to the shore. He takes her hand in his and makes her point at a white bobble on the so-blue-it-hurts horizon. Ariel flutters nearby, three of them, opalescent ghosts with flat chests and flat spaces between their legs.

“Dear daughter,” he says, his bristles brushing her ear, “by morn you’ll be a princess.”

Ariel screams off the beach, its opal skin turning suddenly jet. The salt-stained pines quiver in the sand. She would run from the water, as he alwas did when he kept the sailors away, but he keeps his grip tight on her shoulder. He sings his spells into her ear and keeps his rheumy eyes fixed on the far-off white. The tide pulls out to show the jagged rocks.

The ship approaches. Her father screams his delight, and then it crashes, too far out to plunder, and he just screams. Drops on his knees and howls like a dying jackal as the three black spots that are Ariel flit desperately from plank to plank. Miranda’s hair is wet and her dress is see-through damp from the knees down. The salt on her legs will itch if it dries. She walks up the beach to the grassy slopes, and far off her father wails.

~~

There are always bad dreams after a wreck. Worse now because her father has not spoken since this morning. He still paces near the tide-covered, cursing and gibbering. She can hear him from their home, from the caves cut into the hills. She cannot stand it. They pound weakly on the sea-wrecked hull. The mast snaps like a leg. Her father’s screams add salt to meat. She cannot stand it.

Up the hill, past the rocks like bones, there is a waterfall. The unbreaking silence of the knight and the crash of water on water drowns the drownings in her mind. The shore of the spring is white with chamomile and she spreads her arms in their blossoms. The sky above is cleared of all but the thinnest clouds, and those are curled like far-off smoke far to the western half of the sky. She weeps, and feels better.

He comes, rabbit-silent, jackal-quick, hunched in that loping gait like a frog. He has a torch in one hand, one of the little goats slung over his back, blood from its neck smearing his shoulder. His knotted hair is caught up in a jellyfish knot. His mother sewed beads to his wrists, in a triangle between his eyes, and he has a row of gold rings in each ear. The torchlight makes him gleam

 The way he holds the torch, she cannot see the handprint still burned over collarbone and neck. Only the scar, white and deep, closing one eye and leaving an eternal window into his mouth. Last year both his eyes were bronze coins, the left one nicked by a tiny channel of onyx. His hands were roughened but gentle and the lips he pressed against hers in a close-mouthed kiss were full and soft. Prospero’s shadow loomed on them both. She did not see him again for three days, and when next he appeared he was sitting on the stone head of the dead giant. Picking at the stitches locking his lips. Picking at the charred black skin of the handprint.

Prospero tried to cultivate a hate in her for him, but here is only a hate in her for her.

He had not noticed her and when she sits up he steps back, his eyes gleaming, with fear or the torchlight, she cannot say. He says nothing. He does not look at her. He jabs the torch in the ground and dives into the spring, goat and all. She can see his shape disappearing into the cavern beneath the falls.

A breeze unsticks her hair from her teary cheeks. Ariel opalescent settles beside her. It smells of the sea, and of blood. She bites her lip so as not to gag. It takes her hand in its barely-there fists. 

 _I heard no screaming in the deeper seas_ , it whispers, barely loud enough to be heard over the falls. _They did not suffer. Go, and dream again of pleasant things._

 Miranda wants to curl into the grass and never be found out, or she wants to take a running leap into the spring and hold her breath until she too joins the nest of ghosts playing like dolphins in the surf.

Ariel senses this. Ariel fixes its slate eyes on hers. There is no pupil to them, and the lashes are thick and dark as spiders’ legs.

 _Your father’s age has to the apex climbed_ , it says. _He_ _will not storm so furiously for long._

 That’s even worse. Miranda puts her hands through its hands, watches it break apart like smoke. Stands. There are chamomile petals in her hair. They fall like snow onto her bare feet. Ariel fades into the darkness. Her father is asleep in his bed, sprawled out, still wet, sticky with salt. She lies on her own bed and looks at the cave walls. She does not sleep. She dreams.

(Of what?)

(Of nothing. Of  _somewhere else._ )

~~~

 

Nothing has changed. Everything has changed. The sea comes in, the sea comes out. It brings a plank or two. No chests for her to play dress-up in. No bones. The little spirits in the pine grove collect nuts for her, leave her thimblefuls of honey. She goes to the pool and makes garlands of chamomile. Once she turns around and sees a figure. Caliban, she thinks, hopeful he's come to talk, but it's not him.  Nude, moss-stained, pale and lanky. Formed to be about her age. Pine needles in his hair. He stares at her for a moment and then melts back into the trees. Tree spirit. Odd. Usually they don't choose to be men. 

The real Caliban unstrings the beads from their stitches and butchers goats, rabbit, fish on the stone slab down near the jackal den. Too much, it seems, and he makes too many mistakes, throws the most ragged cuts into his sack. She supposes he's hungry. Usually when Prospero crashed a ship for its bounty Caliban dove into the waters and feasted himself. A long way back, forever ago, he implied his mother taught him. That when he ate the flesh of man he brought back his mother. That, more than anything, it fueled her witchery. Ariel went out to the sea first. Ariel, her father told her one, Ariel they had to feed when they first cracked open the pine. They had to smear goat-blood on the branches to make it listen.

He was reticent to confess that to her. Why, she knew not.There are more disgusting things in her father's books.

She knows. Peeked in them once. She knows a lot, knows what her father does not think she knows. She knows that before they found Caliban hiding in his grotto under the falls her father felt the presence of a powerful sorcerer. He followed the trail of the magic all the way around the island and found a grave filled with a woman's bones. Assumed it was the sorcerer's focus so ground the bones to dust and took revenge on the previous inhabitant like the madman of Rome had revenged himself on the barbarian queen. For safety. So that no ghost would haunt them. He never told Caliban and she didn't either. He had his books stacked haphazard in their cave til she grew old enough to read; now they are hidden in the deepest cave, in a case Caliban carved from seastained pine, locked with magic. He has been in that cave since the wreck. He refuses to come to the beach.

She wanders.

 _By morn you'll be a princess._ But she  _is_ a princess. She's been told that often enough. Her line has not been fairly usurped. Far across the dark waters there is an uncle sitting on a throne he should not have. A tyrant. An ignorant man fearful of magic. He set her out to sea in her father's arms. They only survived with the help of a mother's relative. He provisioned their ship. She catches herself wondering, time to time, why he did that. how. Surely it's harder to sneak a larder onto a rowboat than it is to set two manikins out to sea and spirit away a man and a babe into the dark night. Surely they could've lived among others, or at least she could've. She wonders why they spared her father. If they took a man from the throne, surely it would've been better to make sure he could never, ever get it back? The sea is long and deep, but it is not permanent.

They let Caliban's mother survive. Yes. But she was pregnant. Prospero was not pregnant. Are little children enough to let someone so evil as the blue-eyed witch go free? Are they enough to stop the hand with the assassin's knife? 

Her uncle should have killed them, she decides. Would have been in his best interests.

Her father cried on the beach, cried until he vomited. Raged to match his overblown storm. She wonders why. Usually he saves such rages for sailors washed up alive and with eyes on her body. For ships with Milanese markings. For Caliban. He must know by now – there is no use in screaming. There are no rescuers. No sailors with boats intact. No one to relieve the boredom. You must do as you must to make it go away. Spin seaweed into headdresses. Play chess by yourself. Watch your father read his books, don’t bother reaching out for them because he’ll snap the spine around your fingers.  Lie back and lie still. The oil lamps are out. The door is shut and the night outside is inky blackness. His hands are damp with honey wine, breath so sweet it is sour. He fumbles his fingers over her face, feeling the contours. He runs his hand over her belly, and then lower. The stitching on her gown splits.

 _My Bianca_ , he says.

If she lets herself feel charitable she will remember Bianca was her mother. If she lets herself feel charitable she cites the wine, the loneliness, the steadily worsening wreck of his mind. How sadness and longing can make a face change. How the darkness can warp even a mirror. 

She is not feeling charitable. He put a _just like_ in front of the _my._

_~~~~_

Caliban disappears one day. He should be scraping skins. Hunting. Should be making them dinner. Her father would have scoured the island a week before, would've dragged Caliban out to the pine grove and made sure he'd scrape the trencher evermore but now, now, he doesn't seem to notice. He stays in his private cave with the door locked for days and nights on end, or he crawls into her bed and calls her Bianca, Bianca, Bianca. She's not sure if he's slept lately. She hasn't. She can't. 

Miranda's loneliness slashes knives down her chest. The island is too silent now. She glimpsed the male-shaped tree spirit once, but that was all. Ariel is around - she sees it fluttering in the branches, making ripples over the water - but he doesn't come to speak with her, nor does he come to the cave of her father. The jugs of honey wine stay just as full. No meat, so she leaves plates of fruit and wind-dried fish at her father's door. Leaves fresh-caught fish at Caliban's grotto, as if he couldn't catch them himself. She collects chamomile and makes garlands of it. She walks the island, picking unripe pine nuts from their cones. At night she drifts away from her bed, even if her father is asleep in his own. She thinks of the grey in her father's hair. Thinks of other sails. Of sailors.

She thinks of screaming.

~~~~~

A week after Caliban disappears, Prospero shakes her awake. He is calm. Judging from the circles under his eyes, he has indeed slept. He lets her put on a fresh gown. Together they walk out into a hot misty morning. He has a book tucked under his right arm The sun is not yet fully up, and one would think that the sea had been made from obsidian. They climb up the hill, stopping often so he can catch his wheezing breaths, until finally they are at the cliff, the one overlooking the rocks laid bare by low tide.

"My Miranda," he says. He strokes her cheek. "My lovely girl. Will you forgive me?"

"There is nothing to forgive, father," she lies.

"You've never been a princess," he says, "except to me. I am sorry. I did try."

She says nothing. There is a snake roiling in her belly.

He takes the book in both hands. It is thick, bound in black leather, ancient. He holds it out at arms' length, squints at it.

"I am revenged upon my faithless brother," he says, turning the book in his hands like he's trying to catch the light. "And yet I knew not what I had avenged. He stole a throne, I thought, and hated him, but he gave me a kingdom for to rule."

Miranda wants to back away from the cliff's edge. The water is so still that she can see the rocks at the bottom. 

"I am a king." His smile is peaceful. "I had a princess. Now I have a queen. We ruled our subjects with grace and wisdom, beat back the devils that would threat our power, and made a home upon a barren shore. Long have I thought, Miranda, and right now, I cannot say I did not have my right. What care have I for the shape of the throne? I am vested with grace, brother be damned."

"Indeed you are, sir father." Miranda coughs around the lump in her throat. "Noble lord."

"And now my days are spent. I spent them well." Prospero looks straight at her and his eyes are blank and dumb as rocks. "I'll drown my gifts. I have no need for them.

The book sails through the air like a diving bird. When it hits the rocks it explodes. For a moment its remants lay strewn, as if they are too stunned to move, and then the sea takes them away. 

He lunges for her. She knew he would do it. Had known since he woke her and yet she had not stopped him. He lunges and she spins out of the way but she has always been a slight girl, slender as the whip-thin fish, as the stems of the chamomile, and he was a robust man in his youth. The air going past her ears sounds like the inside of a seashell. It has happened too fast for her to fear.

~~~~~

And. Nothing. No rocks. No stuttering halt. Miranda sees the shape of transluscent fingers round her wrist, just for a moment, and then they are gone. Invisible. She rises back up the cliff, slower.

The tree spirit is there, moss-stained but no longer naked, dressed instead in salt-shrunken rags, and he has a collection of men behind him. Caliban has his beads in. Caliban has power sparking on his fingertips. He is neither smiling nor laughing when he grabs Prospero's neck. Miranda watches her father fall, watches the sea accept him without delay, and feels nothing.

Ariel sets her down on the rocky ground, and the company kneels. All except Caliban. His hair is loose. His rings glint in the early dawn light. The black-and-red handprint on his dark skin fades as the sun comes up. He kneels, and takes her hand, and presses his not-so-full but still lovely lips against her fingertips.

She's a princess now, she supposes, and here in front of her are the ghosts of the island alive and well and kneeling. No more knocking at the mast. No more 

She pulls Caliban up, and she kisses him, and the sun comes up, and the wind returns like a breath of a God, and there is, for once, for the first time she can remember, no scream stuck in her throat.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for my chronic inability to write more than three thousand words at a time, and for my obsession with the passivity of Miranda. Thanks to my nameless sister for running a beta on this, and to Colin Meloy for writing the soundtrack to my process. The island in my head has the ecology of Crete. I heartily recommend Nicholl's essay on the traveller Antonio Pigafetta - it's available in Granta 62, The Sea.


End file.
